GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE by Howard Waldman Page A

into hash, without the concealing mercy of
ketchup either.
    Hash, hash, hash: the kind you’re supposed to eat,
not the kind you smoke to forget unbearable things like the basse cuisine the Five have to endure. Everything is
ice-cold as well. Dessert alternates between blackened banana and
rotting apple. Instead of wine they have lukewarm chlorinated tap
water. There are five menus repeated in inexorable five-day cycles
and identifiable not by taste but by sight.
    They often evoke fabulous meals from their
past, particularly Seymour Stein in the presence of Margaret. It’s
a seduction ploy. He’s noticed that her severely repressed
sensuality responds to gastronomical recitals. Her eyes close
voluptuously in reaction to the foreplay of hors d’oeuvre . With the entrée her moist lips part and
her breathing quickens. At the climax of dessert he sometimes gets
an ecstatic “Ohhh…” out of her. It’s all verbal, not even oral, but
it’s the best he can manage with her.
    Comfort is no better than what a small-town
Mississippi prison offered its colored inmates in the 1930s.
Underclothing is changed only once a supposed week, bed-clothes
once a supposed month. There are no showers. Instead, they dispose
of a big chipped enamel basin and a sponge. The soap is of the
harsh laundry variety. Rusty water flows feebly from the wash-basin
faucet when it flows at all. At best it’s luke warm. There’s no
toothpaste. What for? There are no toothbrushes.
    The toilet facilities are disgraceful even
for Louis who had been on familiar terms with nineteenth century
rural outhouses. There are twenty unisex squat-privies set in
doorless cubicles. Yellowed squares of old newspapers are impaled
on a spike for their convenience. Ancient dark incrustations
surround the bung-hole in the cracked porcelain. The Five learn to
hang a card on the WC doorknob for privacy during their visits
there. They learn to breathe through their mouths.
     
    It’s true that at the beginning, till desire
fades like color in this space, there’s the theoretical exercise of
sex, the great counterweight to boredom. They aren’t dependent on
the Prefecture for that. Anyhow, with its zombie male and female
functionaries, the Prefecture has nothing to offer in that
line.
    For sex, then, the suspended Five are
self-sufficient, in theory. They’re young, normally equipped for
junction and in perpetual contact. That offers six possibilities of
conventional heterosexual duo combinations. But Helen shows no
interest of that sort in any of the men. Pious dread keeps the most
obvious couple, Louis and Margaret, from coupling. Alone in his
bed, Max possesses Margaret savagely in a variety of postures but
he stammers when he tries to talk to her. Seymour too lusts for
Maggie, even in her breast-bound Margaret disguise, and he isn’t
shy. But she’s retreated into sexless mysticism and hardly knows he
exists when he’s not reciting menus.
    Anyhow, even Maggie is a little off-putting,
if you remember (and it’s hard not to) in what decrepit and then
unimaginable state she’d once been before transfer here. As for
Helen, Seymour tries once, much later, but it doesn’t work. Anyhow,
she’s not really his type, he reflects following the failure.
    All in all, then, sex is on a par with the
food and the sanitary and entertainment facilities here.
     
    In short, the Five have been resurrected to
a pale imitation of life. It’s maybe a little better than their
recent void but not much. Real life is outside. But will they ever
be transferred there?

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 11
     
    Relationships
     
    So there they are, three men and two women
of different backgrounds, periods, life-styles, political leanings,
religious or irreligious inclinations and diversely strung nerves,
crammed together in a few square yards for how long God alone
knows, and even that’s not sure. They’re forced to tolerate one
another, no choice in the matter. And resist temptation.